CREATE SESSION CUBE and disk usage

Reposted from Chris Webb's blog with the author's permission.

You learn all kinds of interesting things on the forums! Recently I saw this post from Nils Rottgardt about a problem with the CREATE SESSION CUBE statement and SSAS Multidimensional:

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/sqlserver/en-US/175fc61f-676e-4e3d-bed4-283f151641ec/create-session-cube-command-by-excel-grouping-creates-a-shadow-copy-on-the-server-disk-storage?forum=sqlanalysisservices

Here's a related Connect:

https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/details/822778/excel-grouping-create-session-cube-breaks-ssas-envirounment-because-of-phyically-copy-the-cube-data-for-every-pivot-table

Basically, when you run a CREATE SESSION CUBE statement SSAS creates a shadow copy of the cube on disk - and if you have a very large cube, with very large dimensions, this could use up a lot of storage space on the server. When you use the custom grouping functionality in a PivotTable Excel generates a CREATE SESSION CUBE statement behind the scenes, so it's possible to cause a lot of mischief just by using custom grouping in Excel.

Incidentally, this isn't a problem for SSAS Tabular because it doesn't support the CREATE SESSION CUBE statement.

I always knew this particular functionality could be very slow and always warned people against using it, but I didn't know about the disk space issue. if your users haven't found out about custom grouping yet, I recommend you don't tell them about it!

Chris has been working with Microsoft BI tools since he started using beta 3 of OLAP Services back in the late 90s. Since then he has worked with Analysis Services in a number of roles (including three years spent with Microsoft Consulting Services) and he is now an independent consultant specialising in complex MDX, Analysis Services cube design and Analysis Services query performance problems. His company website can be found at http://www.crossjoin.co.uk and his blog can be found at http://cwebbbi.wordpress.com/ .